THE WASHINGTON POST • BOOK WORLD • SUNDAY, JUNE 20, 2010
12 THRILLERS Cool reads for a smoldering summer
THE BURNING WIRE By Jeffery Deaver Simon & Schuster. 414 pp. $26.99
If there were a prize for the novel best suited for summer reading, my 2010 nomi- nee would be Jeffery Deaver’s “The Burn- ing Wire.” It’s a big, flashy stretch limo of a thriller that brings back Lincoln Rhyme and his assistant, Amelia Sachs, to stop a killer whose weapon of choice is electricity. The action starts when a bus stops in
Manhattan and an electrical booby trap designed to melt the whole vehicle ends up taking out just one victim, who meets a grisly fate indeed. This, however, is only a warm-up for mayhem to come: The chief suspect works for Algonquin Consolidated Power and thus knows the ins and outs of volts, amperes, currents, circuit breakers and all the other concepts and gizmos that keep our lights burning, our appliances humming and our traffic moving. Rhyme, a forensic consultant to the NYPD and a quadriplegic who relies on Sachs to be his feet and eyes in the field, knows next to nothing about “juice” — which is conven- ient because we readers can learn about it by looking over his shoulder. Among the book’s many strengths is giv- ing a sense of what it’s like to be paralyzed (except for some finger movement) from the neck down. Before it’s all over, Rhyme weighs the possibility of improving his con- dition via surgery against the chance that he might not be the same crime-fighter af- terward. “My power comes from my dis- ability,” he reflects — a strange but plausible assessment from a pro who is all business, no self-pity and a pleasure to watch. —Dennis Drabelle
SO COLD THE RIVER By Michael Koryta
Little, Brown. 508 pp. $24.99 It’s in the water: Pluto Water, a gift from
Mother Nature that bubbles out of the ground in rural Indiana. Back in the 19th century, its bottlers passed the stuff off as a panacea — “When nature won’t, Pluto will” — and made lots of money on it, but nobody pays much attention to it today. Except, that is, for Eric Shaw, the film-
maker-protagonist of Michael Koryta’s en- gaging supernatural thriller “So Cold the River.” Eric has gone to Indiana to docu- ment the life of a superannuated billion- aire with Plutonic connections — it’s a humble gig but actually a step up for Eric, who has been reduced to videotaping wed- dings for a living after flubbing an attempt to become a Hollywood director. He realiz- es something is amiss after being given a bottle of vintage Pluto: It’s ice-cold to the touch even when not refrigerated, and when Eric takes a sip, he is rewarded — if that’s the right word — with troubling vi- sions from the region’s past. “So Cold the River” takes a while to build up momentum, but the material is so fresh and the characters so appealing that my in- terest never flagged. After reading it, I’m sticking to good old D.C. tap water. —Dennis Drabelle
THE LION
By Nelson DeMille Grand Central. 437 pp. $27.99
Subconsciously, I may have lumped Nel- son DeMille with Cecil B. DeMille, most of whose movies do nothing for me. After catching up with DeMille’s latest novel, “The Lion,” I see the error of my ways. De- Mille is a brisk storyteller whose hero, re- tired but hardly inactive federal anti- terrorist agent John Corey, is a talented wisecracker. I especially liked his charac- terization of the junk food he grabs and eats on the run: “cheese maggots.” The eponymous lion is Asad Khalil, a Libyan jihadist who has sneaked into the States to wreak vengeance on multiple en- emies, including Corey, who once almost nabbed him. In a bravura early scene, Kha- lil infiltrates a planeload of skydivers that includes Corey and his wife. Corey is in free fall when he looks up and sees that his wife, also in midair, has company: Khalil, who has grappled on to her with malice aforethought. I hadn’t thought it was pos- sible to outdo the crop-dusting sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by North- west” for aerodynamic thrills, but with this scene DeMille may have succeeded. “The Lion” raises a question, however: Can the narrator of a thriller be too droll? About two-thirds of the way through, I was ready for Corey to stop with the one-liners and for his creator to do what DeMille the director would have done: cut to the chase. In his own good time, of course, DeMille the thriller-writer does exactly that. —Dennis Drabelle
THE SINGER’S GUN By Emily St. John Mandel Unbridled. 287 pp. $24.95
“The Singer’s Gun” begins like a
straightforward crime thriller: “In an of- fice on the bright sharp edge of New York, glass tower, Alexandra Broden was listen- ing to a telephone conversation.... A man’s voice: It’s done. There is a sound on the tape here — the woman’s sharp intake of breath.”
But Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel
is something far rarer than this classic noir opening suggests. She introduces us to haunted, often fugitive individuals strand- ed in places from New York to Italy, from the past to the present. And her book strikes a perfect balance between intro- spection and action.
Broden, we soon learn, works for the
State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service division. She is searching for An- ton Walker; we can only guess why. Man- del abruptly takes us to the island of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples, where Anton has stayed on following his honeymoon, his new wife having returned to New York. This elegantly looping narrative repeat-
edly revisits the past, where overlapping secrets explain the links between Anton; Elena, his ex-secretary and recent lover; and Aria, Anton’s cousin and erstwhile
partner in crime. As Mandel skillfully lay- ers and then cunningly exposes these in- terlocking puzzles, we gradually realize that identity fraud is at the heart of the plot and at the core of these lives. Anton’s elderly parents sell stolen antiques while Cousin Aria deals in deadlier contraband. Anton and Elena have invented their own résumés, not for profit but to gain the le- gitimacy of office jobs in a corporate world that Mandel brilliantly depicts as the ulti- mate altered reality.
When Anton is demoted, his carefully constructed life begins to unravel, and his cousin pressures him to participate in one last crime. “There was an idea he’d been thinking about for years now,” Mandel writes of her oddly attractive hero. “Every- thing he saw contained a flicker of divin- ity.... It still seemed plausible in those days that everything might somehow fall back into place.” Dread gradually supplants hope, how-
ever, and when violence intrudes — sick- ening in its casual efficiency — the best that Mandel’s characters can hope for is the chance to live a different kind of lie. Mandel’s readers, on the other hand, will surely appreciate the novel’s decidedly grown-up denouement, a fitting conclu- sion to an eminently satisfying thriller. —Anna Mundow
bookworld@washpost.com
Dennis Drabelle is mysteries editor of Book World. Anna Mundow is a literary correspondent for the Boston Globe and a contributor to the Irish Times.
IZHAR COHEN
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